Developments in the Scientific Study of Nationality Languages in the Thirty-five Years Since Our Nation Was Founded

Abstract

In the old society, there were some minority nationality scholars who conducted investigations into their own and other nationalities' languages, publishing dictionaries, grammars, and orthographies. There were also some Han nationality scholars as well as foreign scholars who likewise conducted research on certain nationality languages and published dictionaries, grammars, and descriptive works. It was only after the founding of New China that universities started large-scale training of minority research workers for minority linguistics scientific research, including training many minority science and research workers; conducting large-scale general surveys on the minority languages of the whole country; proposing dialectal divisions for languages based on the results of their research and investigation; and helping to design writing systems for those nationalities that had requested such help. This work could only be done after the founding of the New China. The socialist system and the party's policie...